Early Kentucky Derby party brings out the cuties at Hermann Park

Single and sophisticated? Sign up right now for the Hermann Park Conservancy's Urban Green young professionals group. The tony "A Night at the Races" fundraiser that the group held Thursday at the historic clubhouse overlooking the golf course was rich with Cute Young Things and Handsome Devils. Nary a tatoo or body piercing anywhere in sight. (No comment on what might have been beneath the layers of Derby Day chic attire.)

Several hundred swell-looking twentysomething and thirtysomething singles and married couples dressed in the requisite "big hats and bow ties" asked for in the invitation. None had larger hats than the four chairs — Whitney Bossin, Courtland Crosswell, Kat Hofmann and Jessica Ledger. We loved the guys who were game enough to wear seersucker suits and white buck shoes and most of them obliged with bow ties.

The spiffy crowd sipped on traditional mint juleps, rum punch and martinis as they strolled the grounds adjacent to the clubhouse and grazed through food stations that offered everything from fried okra and red beans and rice to shrimp dishes and chicken fingers. The tasty offerings were from Rice Epicurean Catering, Butter Catering and Graham Gemoets, who worked the party with flare in his Kentucky Derby get-up.